Educator of the Week: Kristin Colsey, Dobbs Ferry

Who: Kristin Colsey, a second-grade teacher at Springhurst Elementary School in Dobbs Ferry

Since when: A Yorktown native, Colsey has taught in Dobbs Ferry since 2010.

What’s new: Colsey was a fitness nut and serious marathon runner when, in November 2011, she felt a painful pressure in her stomach. She had to have emergency surgery at Phelps Memorial Hospital Center in Sleepy Hollow because of a potentially deadly vascular condition called an abdominal aortic aneurysm, basically a blood-filled bulge in the abdominal aorta that had burst. Colsey didn’t know it at the time, but the survival rate was about 10 percent.

Colsey has been slowly building her strength after a slow, difficult recovery. She plans to run in the Sleepy Hollow Half-Marathon on Saturday, March 22, along with siblings and friends, to raise awareness of the condition known as “Triple A.” About 200,000 people are diagnosed with it every year in the U.S. Most AAAs can be detected through a simple ultrasound screening, and at least 95 percent can be treated if detected prior to rupture.

Why she teaches: “My whole family are teachers. I never considered anything else. It’s worked out great for me.”

Hard-earned wisdom: “I talk to the kids a lot about setting goals and persevering. I don’t talk specifically about what happened to me, but about my running and how you have to work hard to get better at something. I have to set goals, just like them.”

Her goal: Colsey ran five New York City marathons and had times under three hours before her health scare. Now she wants to get healthy and feel good. “My goal is to appreciate my life in a different way and to set goals for myself and work towards them.”

A website she recommends: For information about Triple A, go to aoutreach.org.

Gary Stern covered education in the Lower Hudson Valley for several years during the early 1990s. Now's he back on the beat. He believes that schools are one of the main reasons that people live around here and that educational issues -- from curriculum to financing -- are among the most challenging things that journalists can write about. He continues to be amazed by the complexity of educational jargon.
Gary got his B.A. at SUNY Buffalo and his M.A. from the University of Missouri Journalism School (where his master's thesis was about the best ways to cover education). He lives in White Plains with his wife and two sons, who attend public schools.